The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Gang

Continued (page 4 of 4)

When they stopped at a gas station, Dylan went into the shop to buy some pastries, sunflower seeds, and Gatorade. When he got back in the car, Ryan said tensely, "I think that's an undercover guy in that white SUV." Ryan noticed that he had a laptop and that the backseat was caged. Lee-Grace felt her body go numb. Dylan lay down on the floor in the backseat and told Ryan to drive and see if they were followed. "Just be calm, guys. Just be calm," he said. They pulled out of the gas station and onto I-25 going south. The road stretched behind them, empty until it dissolved into the gray mist. Lee-Grace had just started to breathe when Ryan shouted, "We've been made! We've been made!" There, fifty yards behind them, the white SUV had emerged, big headlights first.

Ryan hit the gas. And as they began racing down 25, state troopers filled the road behind them. They saw an exit ramp, but it was blocked by cop cars. So was the next one.

"This is gonna end really badly," Dylan said.

"Does it hurt to get shot in the head?" Ryan wanted to know.

"I don't think it will hurt," Dylan said. Whether he was holding one of his guns right then, whether he was getting ready to shoot at the cars that kept appearing and disappearing in the mist behind them and seemed to multiply with every reappearance, is not something Dylan chooses to talk about. "They'll take me out first," he said to his brother and sister. "Then Ryan. They might not shoot you, Lee-Grace, because you're a girl. They might wait to see if you're gonna surrender."

"If they kill both of you, I don't want to be left alive," she said.

They were quiet after that. Ryan pushed the car up to 120 miles an hour, and Lee-Grace gripped the shoulder strap of her seat belt with one hand. Dylan was thinking he should tell Ryan to slow down, take the car over the median, onto the other side of the highway, and off an entrance ramp—the cops hadn't barricaded those. If he had said it, "we would've been three amigos gone like a fart in the wind," but he hesitated, and then they saw the cops with their automatic rifles lined up on the overpass up ahead. "This is it, this is it!" Ryan said, not excited at all, just sounding grim. "Lee-Grace, get down, duck down."

"I love you, guys!" she cried, her hand reaching for Ryan's arm.

"I love you!"

"I love you!" her brothers called back. With their eyes glued to the armed men above, they didn't see the spike strips laid out in the shadow of the overpass. When they hit them, they heard a pop, and then they were rolling over, around and around, the car filling with darkness, then light, dark, then light, Dylan thinking it felt like being a lotto ball, Lee-Grace feeling his body pressed hard against the back of her seat.

When the car smashed nose first into a guardrail, they finally came to a stop. Dylan found himself on the road, shoeless; he must've been thrown there, though he didn't remember flying. He watched as Ryan ran in one direction and Lee-Grace in another. He heard a shot, tried to get up, but three officers were pointing guns at him. He could see Lee-Grace holding her leg and cursing out a cop. So she was alive. He lay back down on the pavement, listening for any sign of his brother Ryan.

Ryan ran and ran. He couldn't think straight. His head was fuzzy. He saw a restaurant and headed toward the back of it. He stopped; he whirled around—which direction, which direction? When he saw three men approaching him at a crouch, he shouted, "Stay away from me! They're gonna shoot me!" He loped off unsteadily. One of the men came at him from behind and tackled him to the ground.

It was all over. They lay separate from one another, each guarded by men with guns. Red lights swooped round and round, ambulances rushed in, but all of that bustle faded to a low roar; nobody had ever really existed for them but one another, and that morning they reached out through the chaos and felt one another's presence, as they always had.

···

When the siblings were moved from the local hospital to the Pueblo County jail, they were put in solitary cells. As Dylan lay down on the bunk bed, he saw the initials E.D. carved into the metal frame above him, the same initials as his sister Erin. He felt strangely at peace. He had done his best.

Ryan had sprained an ankle in the crash, and while he was being led into the jail, handcuffed and shackled, an officer walking behind him stamped down on the leg chains just as Ryan had lifted his foot—the pain was so severe, Ryan shat in his pants. At night another officer kept coming to his cell, waking him with taunts: "You're going away forever—you ain't never seeing sunlight again."

Once they were transferred to Huerfano County jail, the harassment stopped. The staff at Huerfano was professional. Lee-Grace was kept on one side of the jail with the women, unable to see her brothers, but that didn't stop her from occasionally making birdcalls to them, "Caw-caw! Caw-caw!" Ryan and Dylan were put in separate pods, each with a handful of other inmates; the brothers couldn't talk, but they could see each other through the Plexiglas. They both began to work out on the gym equipment, play cards, mostly spades, with their cellies, and write letters.

Ryan wrote Amber incessantly and included notes to his baby boy: "Hey Buddy. What you been up 2 suckin your thumb Well it took 22yrs but I quit. haha...I can't wait 2 Be Free So we can be 2gether. Dress in matchin outfits." He told his son stories of his childhood: "I remember as a kid flying this kite it soared above the trees so high how time drags on son when you're young. All you want to do is grow up than you get older and you wish the clock would slow down...Every time I'd kiss your mom my heart would beat faster time would slow down and my palms would get sweaty. Everytime. That's how you know your in love It hurts when there not next to you. I hurt real bad. But I'll live 4 the hope I can be with you and your mom again."

Since he's been locked up, Ryan's had nightmares, and during one he punched the wall of his cell so hard he thinks he may have broken some bones. He wants to get his hand fixed, because he knows he's gonna need it in prison.

"I feel awful every day that my brother and sister, they're in here with me and possibly facing even more time than me," he says. "They tell me not to feel bad, they're okay. They tell me not to have any regrets, but I can't help it."

Dylan faces twenty-three charges in Colorado, including attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer. "Dear Mother, Well, I don't know what to say other than I love you a lot, always have and always will.... I guess I should tell you that as the charges stand now I am facing around 134 years, 64 in CO 35 in GA and 35 in FL..." Lee-Grace also faces a charge of attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer in Colorado for shots allegedly fired during the car chase, and first-degree assault for allegedly aiming a machine pistol at an officer as she tried to flee the car wreck. He shot her in the leg, though later told reporters he had aimed for her stomach.

On November 1, she pled not guilty to the twenty-nine charges filed against her, and she will go to trial in February. After Colorado is done with her, she faces federal charges for armed bank robbery in Georgia and fleeing-to-elude charges in Florida. Ryan faces twenty-four charges in Colorado and who knows how many in Georgia and Florida. But after all that gets settled, there will be one more to face: violation of his probation. Punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.

Dylan laughs ruefully when asked if he would've done things differently, seeing how they turned out. "Well, this right here wasn't part of the plan," he says. "To be honest, I don't know what the fuck we were thinking. I mean, with the smartphones and the snitches on every corner and the media, I don't know how the hell we thought we were gonna make it. To start with, it really wasn't something I planned out. If I had planned it out better, we probably would've gotten away with this, because—I can say it right now—we definitely have the mustard to do it. You know the reason we did it—it was my brother. I wouldn't have done it for anybody else. It was all because I truly loved my brother, and I was willing to do anything to keep him away from the end result of what was ultimately coming on the horizon for him."

Dylan's working out a deal with his lawyers to be sent to the same prison as Ryan. This deal will most likely involve Dylan pleading guilty to certain charges or taking a stiffer sentence. "I can't watch over Lee-Grace no matter what, because she'll be going to a women's prison," Dylan says. "But if I can get sent to the same facility as Ryan, even if we don't get to share a cell, I can look after him. My job didn't end at the car wreck on 25. I feel the responsibility continuously. At the end of the day, he's my little brother, and I'll always have his back. And that's just the way it is. I don't know why I'm like that, but I am."